grounded flight

"I had to unlearn their prison speak,
refuse to make wishes on the star
on the sheriff's chest.

I started wishing on the stars instead.
I said to the sun, 'Tell me about the big bang.'
The sun said, 'It hurts to become.'

I carry that hurt on the tip of my tongue
and whisper 'bless your heart' every chance I get
so my family tree can be sure I have not left.

You do not have to leave to arrive.
I am learning this slowly.
So sometimes when I looking the mirror
my eyes look like the holes in the shoes
of the shoe shine man.

Sometimes my hands are busy on the wrong things.
Some days I call my arms 'wings'
while my head is in the clouds.

It will take me a few more years to learn flying
is not pushing away from the ground."

-Andrea Gibson,
excerpt from her poem I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power's Out.

what flying requires.

"In work of love, the body
forgets its weight. And once 
again with love and singing 
in mind, I come to what 
must come to me, carried 
as a dancer by a song.
This grace is gravity."
~Wendell Berry

the ones who held.

"POSSIBILITY.

Gravity.

We dealt with hunger. We dealt with cold. We were the ones who held things together. Knit one, purl two. We were the ones who, after working all day, made the meals. And the beginning. We made sure everybody ate. And the end. We were the ones who, if the cupboard was bear, faced the open mouths of our children. And the way we thought grew from what we did. And the end and the beginning. We were the ones who nursed the dying through death. The wheel. The ones who birthed, who had blood on our hands, the ones who suckled. We fed the calves and milked the cows. We worked in the fields. We wrung the neck of the chicken, and tended the fire that cooked the stew. The double ax. These labors shaped our thinking. We were the ones who watched the wearing down and the daily mending and did what had to be done with the lost. We were the ones who knew what it all meant. Each breath. The cost. The years. We knew the limits. Gravity. And what had to be done. We knew the length of caring. The weight. We felt children come to life in our bodies; even if we had no children we knew what the necessities were. The pull. Our hands made decisions we knew had to be made The motion.  when there was no more caring, when there was no more food. The end and the beginning. Our bodies knew loss. The circle. Our bodies knew limitation. We were weary. The gravitational pull. Our limbs made the decision to move. Day after day we kept things going. Knit one, purl two. We were the ones who held things together. Purl two, knit one. And we were the ones who unraveled the patterns. Who refused to move. The centrifugal force. We were the ones who resisted. We were the ones who decided this can go on no longer, and placed our bodies in the way. The curve of light. What we thought came out of what we did. The lens. And we learned by doing. The focus. Necessity forced us to act together. The reflection. And we were the ones who learned from closeness. We smoothed the way from one to another. We saw the pulling away and the cleaving. We balanced the weight of needs in our hands. Knit one. And we waited for the right time. The bread rising. So if one of us was brave purl two all of us were filled with courage. The circle of motion. We did what they called impossible. The verb. We existed in ways they called unreal. The word. But our ideas came from what we did. And that is how we imagined The pull what we could do. And doing made us imagine more. And so our thoughts were grave the double ax and yet we laughed together. Knit one, purl two. We were the ones The beginning who held the dying and the grieving and the end and the birthing and the born. The weight And this is why we hold each other. The weight of this earth. And this is how our thinking has formed."

--Susan Griffin, from Women and Nature

Voices on love, particularity, integrity, gravity, and staying with.

"Sometimes the most radical act is to stay home."

"To bear witness [to know] is not a passive act." 
"It all comes down to relationships" [and having] "a heightened curiosity of other."
"If we don't know who we live among, then when they vanish, there's no one to mourn that loss."
"The challenge is to stay. The challenge is to be present with that pain.
and "making commitments to do the real work, the hard work" [of being in relationship.]

--Terry Tempest Williams



"To love means to stay with.
[...]
to love means to stay with when every cell says 'Run!'"
--Clarissa Pinkola Estes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~




Staying home.
Coming home.
Knowing who we live with.
Knowing them so we can love them, honor them, protect them in their own integrity.
Then we can be in ours.

Standing ground.
Standing tall, in place.
Rising rooted like trees.
Rooted to the earth.
Rooted to each other.
[Tethered in the heart.]
The challenge is to stay.
The challenge is particularity.
To know and be known
truly and fully, and to stand in our own truth with integrity.
To be accountable to ourselves, and each other.
To hold to what is difficult.
To hold to the difficult in relationship
and see it through, to understanding,
acceptance, and love.
To hold to the difficult.
To not abandon each other.
To never abandon each other. 

To never abandon the crying scared child in each other's deepest hearts.
To love each other back to life,
back to truth,
back to wholeness,
and the knowingness that we belong
here,
together. 

"to gather the things within my reach and to protect them." -Will Falk (from his essay To Be a Warrior Poet)

To protect them. The things we are in relationship to. The particularities of our lives.
 
To not enact the violence of indifference and uncaring, that is perpetuated by cultural mindsets of separation, individualism, and interchangeability, hardness, distance, and cold reason.

To feel each other's pain.



Peggy O'Mara:
"Don't stand unmoving outside the door of a crying baby whose only desire is to touch you. Go to your baby. Go to your baby a million times."

Alison Rose Levy:
"Hearing the cries of the world means hearing the cries of a baby whether that baby is one month old or 100 years old and whether that baby is a human, a kitty, or an elephant cub.
This is offered to the people who know what to do, and the people who know but have forgotten. It is offered especially to those who were left crying because someone stood outside the door... either through hesitation, fear, numbness, hardness, or any other agenda or 'reason.'
May those who remember reach out for the millionth time.
May those who know but forget, remember.
For those who hesitate, doubt or fear, listen to the cry and allow it to move you to courageous action, more courageous than what any warrior pose can teach you.
And for those with numbness, hardness, and other agendas and reasons, only by allowing the cry to reach your heart and melt your plans, your agendas, and your reasons into a puddle that runs out the door, down the gutter and into the river, only then will you yourself heal, only then will you become capable of serving as an agent of healing, and only then will the empty space within the many words spoken be filled with the tears of truth.
And for those who cry out for any wrong or grief, any loss, betrayal or hurt, may you find consolation, may you find your natural community of protectors, may you draw to you those capable of deep caring-- and may your consolation become the consolation of the earth. Because as your soul swims softly outward on its outflowing tears and your heart speaks its truth and finds gentle listeners, so you become the bearer of the truth that lives in the heart of all and the one who always listens and answers.
Do you hear the call?"Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
"A tear, heard by anyone of heart, is understood as a cry to come closer."

Alison Rose Levy:
"It's not merely about the newborn either. We all carry that cry and when the duress becomes too great, it emerges. There are those who listen when the sound is no more than a whisper. And there are those who are deaf when a loved one or child is screaming-- or they blame that child. And that is the inhumanity that is upon the land and within many of us in these times."

Alison Rose Levy:
"From the right to know and the duty to inquire flows the obligation to act." You know people say, 'Don't get too involved in this, it's not your problem.' Like we all live in little boxes and what goes on beyond that wall doesn't exist. With enough acreage you can live like an ostrich and feel free while enjoying the view. This is exactly the fragmentation of community that is turning the earth into a hell zone."

Sarah Alexander:
"We are strongly being pulled now to face our shadows squarely, honestly, without shame, in order to understand what is still holding us back and to let it go. It is hard enough to be honest with ourselves; much less with others. But every. single. time. we. take. a. breath. and. speak. truth. we become freer to act in integrity, and thus liberate humanity a little more from bondage."


Integrity. From Integritas, meaning Intact. Whole. Undivided. Sound.

Alison Rose Levy:
"For me, there is just no way of integrity in standing by while harm is happening and being tolerated. And to act far away and not be righteous up close doesn't count for much. Nor does being a warrior for yourself but not on behalf of those you love."

Sandra Steingraber:
"We are not beautiful by how we look but by how we love, not attractive by what we wear but by what we give and not smart in how we talk but in how we act."


Aloofness might just be the worst thing for this world.
It is like floating above, imaginally,
pretending to not be subject to the gravity
of the situation;
pretending that you are not connected to all everything.


It is in relationship that we feel the heavy weight of our connection. It is meant to be heavy. It is meant to be hard. That is how we know what is real. We can't turn away from that.
Gravity is here to hold us to what we belong to.
We can pretend to cast it off with carelessness, coolness, lightness. We can pretend that there is distance, that these particularities don't matter, aren't real. We can pretend that we can fly off easy into other spaces, novel, new, simple. We can try.
But here, now, we are subject to gravity, in all that we do.
We will be held to it. This is true accountability.
This is not something meaninglessly draped over us, weighting us down unnecessarily, keeping us from moving fast enough toward our dreams, or something we can cast off. Our dreams are bound in it, by it. Our dreams of freedom are bound in and by our relationships to each other. We cannot be free without them. We are bound to them, and our freedom is in how we embrace this.
That is gravity's law.
That is the weight, the heaviness, the difficulty of relationship.
And this is to be honored with our attention, with open, feeling hearts. Hearts that are willing to be heavy, willing to be bound, willing to be hurt. 
Hurting. Bleeding.
That is love.
Not easy. Not floating. Not painless. Not free. But bound in one another's lives and love and pain.
Bound in promise.
Promise being the root of "response"
as in responsibility.
as in response-ability.
as in being present.
as in active relating.

as in spontaneous co-arising.
as in true relationship.

Ben Garrison: 
"A choice to live sacred And because love would lead us to believe that we all belong to the earth and to each other.with hope and desire. bound to a future." [together.]


If we act as though everything is passing, and can pass without impact or float by without pain; if we act as thought we can float, unscathed, in a world of sharp edges trying to meet and fit in a better way; if we do not love particularly; if our love isn't heavy and doesn't hurt to hold some times...
then we are just kidding ourselves. What is any of that worth?

No. Gravity, heaviness, being bound together, that is what makes us creatures worthy and capable of love.
That we can hurt and love.
That we can love and hurt.
That we can love in spite of hurt
not in lieu of it.
Yes.
That we can love in spite of hurt, not in lieu of it.
And that we are bound to do so.
And that we then bind to each other.
And that we then, inevitably, hurt.
And that we then, still, again, hold to love, and hold to each other, despite.
And that we then understand and remember our responsibility to honor that love with our actions.



That is embracing gravity.
That is integrity.

That is love.



"The weight of the world
is love.

--Alan Ginsberg

Gravity's Law

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing-
each stone, blossom, child -
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things teach us:
to fall,
patiently trusting our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

Gravity

[Reflections on home and relationship, in interpretation of Alfonso Cuarón’s movie Gravity.]

 

Gravity
That we are floating
That we are held down
That we are alone
That we are one
That we are lost
That we are in the right place. 




 

Gravity. 
That we have a home.
That we have love.
Soil.
Soul.
Mud.
That we are all
That we are none.
 

Gravity.
Can't stop crying
can't stop reaching
can't stop trying to grab hold
of everything that's floating away
from me.

Let go.
Tethered in the heart.

Hold on.
We must hold on to love.



 







Gravity.
That we all belong to the earth.
Gravity.
That this is home. 
That we are bound.








Gravity.
Binding.
Gravity. Weighting without crushing.
Gravity. Holding us to what is ours.
Holding us to what we belong to.

Gravity.
Love.
Same thing.

We can float in easy silence

or we can stand
feet pressed in
in the buzzing world
alive
together.



  

 
Gravity.
Howling into the abyss.


Gravity.
Howling our hearts into the silence. 


Gravity.
Howling Howling.
Wailing. Howling. Screaming. Loving. Howling. Moaning. Loving. Barking. Barking. Howling. 
Howling.

Healing.
Wholing.
Wholing. 
Homing. 
Coming home
to the heavy gravity
of particularity,
relationship.

Gravity.
Coming home. 







Gravity.
Surrendering to the weight
of what we belong to.

written 3/10/14

all images from gravitymovie.warnerbros.com